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Cooking, eating, shopping, reading, talking, learning…. my next meal. Happily, my obsession and career intersect – in the kitchen, on the page, and on TV. I’m a cooking columnist, cookbook author, recipe developer, and tester of all things kitchen-related. Much of what I do is right here. Poke around and enjoy! Get in touch, even…..

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I’m all about options, and making my own ice cream sandwiches provides them aplenty because I get to choose both components – cookie and ice cream filling. Dancing Deer (www.dancingdeer.com) and Pepperidge Farm Crispy Chocolate Chunk cookies work particularly well – they come 9 and 8 to a package, respectively. A few favorite combos are Dancing Deer Molasses Clove cookies with coffee ice cream, Dancing Deer Sugar Cane Lime cookies with mango sorbet, and, for fellow chocolate fiends, Dancing Deer Chocolate Tangerine cookies with chocolate ice cream. Just try to get flavors like that from soggy, pre-fab, supermarket ice cream sandwiches (which do, however, have their place in the universe).

Make sure to use dense, premium ice cream, such as Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, and sorbet packed in round, pint-size containers, and that it’s frozen as hard as possible. Even so, though, be warned that sorbet will always make a squishier sandwich than ice cream.

This method, which I learned from my friend Raquel (www.raquelpelzel.com) works well because both the cookies and the ice cream container, and therefore its contents, measure about 3-inches in diameter. When you slice right through the container, the cardboard provides extra support for the slice of ice cream, helping it retain its shape.